This from the Guardian:

Claire Enders, the chief executive of Enders Analysis, told a Commons committee that newspapers would close across Britain because revenues would collapse by 52% – or £1.3bn – between 2007 and 2013.

“We are expecting up to half of all the 1,300 titles will close in the next five years,” Enders told the Commons culture, media and sport select committee hearing on the future of local and regional media.

Ouch. This one goes into the “I-don’t-know-whether-to-laugh-or-cry-or-both” file. Correspondent Jason Jones intones, “You guys are like a walking Colonial Williamsburg.”

See the video clip after the jump.

By Jim Johnson
PoHo contributor and founder of The State of Sunshine blog

Jack Shafer has an excellent piece on Slate.com about the real impact Americans will see when newspapers across the country stop.

His article, Life After Newspapers: Learning from the 1962-63 New York newspaper strike, includes good insight:

No conversation about newspapers’ dismal present is complete without some anguished mention of how democracy will go off the rails unless the press is there to set it straight … But even though the 1962-63 strike upended New York, neither the dozen newspaper accounts I’ve read about the strike nor the histories or memoirs from the era that I’ve pulled down from my shelf make it sound as though democracy and governance disappeared when the New York dailies’ lights went out.

Instead, journalists and publishers improvised, and readers, parched for news, features, entertainment, and advertising, experimented with finding new sources.

This time, however, the new sources are not the solution they are actually the problem.

Jeff Jarvis, author of BuzzMachine, has a saying: “If the news is that important, it will find me.” To some extent I agree.

Journalism, and the larger news world, will not disappear. But it will change. I will get my news from a number of places — each with a particular specialty.

The future of a news organization, be it mainstream (Tampa Tribune, St. Petersburg Times, or WTSP Channel 10) or an alternative media (Creative Loafing), will be the same. Find a niche and specialize. Stop trying to cast a wide net by providing news that is a mile wide and an inch deep… be THE source for a subject or very narrow range of related subjects, and readers will be there in droves. Being just like every other organization, reporting everything to everyone, is a losing proposition.

News organizations are scared. Darn scared. The revolution is coming and only a few will survive.

Circulation fell at all major FLA dailies, and it fell 7 percent across the nation. That is 3 million-plus fewer print readers than six months ago.

Michael Hinman over at The Business Journal reports:

The St. Petersburg Times remains one of the nation’s top 25 circulated newspapers, but like its counterparts, the Times’ daily numbers are eroding.

The Audit Bureau of Circulations ranked the Times 22nd in the nation in Monday through Friday circulation over a six-month period ending in March despite a 10 percent dip that brought its daily print run to 283,093 compared to 316,007 a year ago. Although it lost more than 32,000 subscribers over the past year, its declines weren’t as sharp as many other newspapers in the top 25, and it even moved ahead of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution in overall Monday through Friday circulation.

Daily circulation at The Tampa Tribune dropped by more than 25,000 subscribers Monday through Friday, representing an 11.4 percent drop to 195,277 subscribers. The Sarasota-Herald Tribune lost 17,650 subscribers, a 15.4 percent fall to an average of 97,254 subscribers.

So it is an indication of the Trib’s decline that two of those three now work for the rival St. Petersburg Times. And here is a weekly video segment with Ruth and Troxler discussing the ideas of the day, and it is surprisingly good (for two old print guys sitting in front of a camera, that is).

Yes, we journalists did it to ourselves, in part. And yes, I know this vid mocks The New York Times, but I think the lesson applies across the board. I found it silly earlier this week to see a great newspaper being forced to offer buyouts and cut benefits and yet still throw four (yes, that’s 4, count ‘em) reporters and at least one photog on a story about Denny’s offering free Grand Slam Breakfasts.

The Christian Science Monitor quit being a newspaper: It will publish online only. Reportedly, the Tampa Tribune will follow suit in January.

I was flabbergasted. Not because of the idea of something drastic happening to the print product (which just about everyone in the business that I speak with expects) but because I thought I had missed it being verified. Sticks of Fire even picked it up. So I e-mailed the writer of the piece, the Democrat’s Gerald Ensley, about where this story had been reported, and he replied:

No, it hasn’t been reported. I had heard it from several people in the business and originally wrote it as “Rumor has it that the Tampa Tribune . . . ” For brevity, it got shortened to “Reportedly.” I wish it hadn’t.

Sorry.
Gerald Ensley

But Ensley’s fact error was just one piece of the Tribune’s bad week. When The Tribune Co., which is destroying owns such papers as the Chicago Tribune and LA Times, declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy action, many in Tampa Bay saw only “Tribune Co.” and thought it was the Tampa Tribune that was having financial problems and heading to court. Wrong. The Tampa Tribune is owned by RIchmond, Va.-based Media General, which, while it has its own financial struggles, is not in Chapter 11 bankruptcy. (Where my own newspaper company, Creative Loafing Inc., finds itself as well, to be fully transparent here.)

This prompted a full-page ad touting that the Tampa Tribune is here to stay and a remarkable front-page collaboration between Editor Janet Coats and Publisher Denise Palmer in Sunday’s newspaper. In the “story” titled “This newspaper is fighting back,” the pair hawkishly declared again that the Trib is here to stay and will fight back against the hegemony of the St. Petersburg Times:

In the past few weeks, rumors have swirled around this community and the journalism industry about the future of The Tampa Tribune. Many were confused by the Chicago-based Tribune Co.’s very public bankruptcy filing last week, thinking The Tampa Tribune is owned by the same company that owns the Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times and Orlando Sentinel.

For the record, we are not. We are owned by Richmond, Va.-based Media General; our company is not seeking protection in the bankruptcy courts.

While that confusion is understandable, even more disturbing has been the persistent rumor that we’re going to close the Tribune after the Super Bowl, relying on our Web site, TBO.com, as the conduit for our journalism and advertising.

The Tallahassee Democrat reported that rumor as fact, and we demanded a correction. Subscription solicitation crews, working for the St. Petersburg Times, spread rumors that the Tribune is closing in January. We have asked the Times to stop the solicitors from spreading this lie.

UPDATE: The Tampa Bay Business Journal reports that the Times admits that one of its independent contractors repeated the rumors:

An independent contractor who runs kiosks in front of stores had employees who heard and repeated the rumor about the Tribune, said Andrew Corty, vice president of Times Publishing Co., which owns the Times. The contractor is not part of the Times, and the employees involved have been replaced.

Palmer and Coats then went on to make the case statistically that it is the St. Petersburg Times that is shrinking and providing less local news coverage. I’ll be looking at those over the next few days to fact-check them and give some context, but in the meantime, let’s state the obvious: the quality of the journalism at the Times is markedly better than that at the Tampa Tribune. It has been for more than three decades. I left the Trib to go to the Times in 1992 for that very reason. In those days, the difference in quality between the two papers was less stark than it is today.

Last Friday, one of the Trib’s best-known columnists, Dan Ruth, appeared in on the pages of the rival Times‘ op-ed section. Ruth was laid off from the Trib last month. Another is set to follow in the next week (sorry, can’t give names on this one yet, my source insists.) The Times has a history of raiding the best editors and writers from the Trib for nearly 20 years now, starting with premier Times B-section columnist Howard Troxler.

The Trib’s response? Nothing. It let its best and brightest (most recently, see: Montgomery, Ben) leave for better-writing and better-paying pastures across Tampa Bay. The overall quality of its journalism today’s bears evidence of those unattended wounds.

Does that mean the Trib sucks? Far from it. It is still a better newspaper than most in the nation. Next time you travel, just grab any city’s paper and compare. In our Best of the Bay Awards this year, we gave a nod to a story that Coats and Palmer cited in their Sunday piece: the Trib’s fight against the CSX rail deal. They did not mention, however, that one of the two reporters on that story, Billy Townsend, took a buyout offer from left the Tribune when it was clear that his future there was uncertain. The main reporter on the series, Lindsay Peterson, remains at the paper.

And finally, let me say how sad it is to see the wiping out of the separation of news and editorial at the Tribune. The kind of boosterism that was foisted on the reading public on Sunday might have been semi-excusable coming from the publisher alone, but it is inexcusable coming from the editor of the newspaper, who has to maintain the paper’s credibility and standards away from the business side of the publication and any marketing spin.

Recent departures have left the Palm Beach Post with two reporters, the Tampa Tribune with one. The South Florida Sun-Sentinel last year reduced its staff from two to one. The Orlando Sentinel is holding at two reporters. The Miami Herald has three. Four New York Times-owned regional papers share a staff of two.

The largest news operation belongs to Gannett, which has five reporting positions for readers in Pensacola, Fort Myers, Cocoa Beach and Tallahassee.

… That brings us to the St. Petersburg Times, which has three full-time reporters based in the capital and senior correspondent Lucy Morgan. That’s down from four a year ago (what this bureau chief calls “a 25 percent cutback” to his bosses).

Those departures include S.V. Date from the Post. Date, you may recall, literally wrote the book on Jeb Bush’s terms as governor but was none too beloved by his fellow newsies. He used to write his own “Omega Blog” on state politics, but it has disappeared from his website.

Yes, young children, there was a time when the Capitol press corps was busting at the seams with hungry reporters looking to get a “pelt,” taking down a legislator who was doing wrong. The combined press offices on College Avenue was bustling. Not so much any more. We voters back home are the ones who suffer. Legislators know how much attention is paid to Tallahassee by the folks back home in the absence of any scrutiny. And finding out what is going on in the Capitol is not exactly something you can do 100 percent just by clicking on your computer screen at Online Sunshine.

Has the digital world stepped up to take its place? Let me know what you think and which blogs you read that are doing (even partially) primary source reporting of the goings-on in the state Legislature.

The Times did not tell you, until a separate blurb at the bottom of the story, that it’s employees appear to be Wiki-editors, as well. Using Virgil, the same search engine that the Times used, you can find the 21 occasions over the past year in which Times‘ computers were used to change Wikipedia entries, from poker player David Singer to the US embargo against Cuba. All but one were simple corrections to errors in entries; earlier this year, however, someone at the Times added a link to the entry on Lou Pearlman that pointed readers to Helen Huntley’s Money Talk blog. Huntley has done some groundbreaking work on Pearlman over the years.

There may or may not be something wrong with linking to your own info, but on the whole, the Times‘ time spent wiki-ing appears fairly innocuous. And I get the fact that state workers on your dime are hardly the same as privately employed individuals working on 1st Ave. S. Still, it would have been nice to inform readers higher up in the main story that wiki-editing apparently goes on just about anywhere there is a computer network.

A search on Virgil for Creative Loafing IP’s turned up just three Wiki-edits in three years, one of which concerns a story that our Atlanta senior editor John Sugg has been writing about for years — the court fight between Fox 13 in Tampa and its former reporters, Steve Wilson and Jane Akre. The edit, which disputes a contention earlier in the entry, echoes language that Sugg has used in CL and on his own blog.

Also in 2005, a CL employee added the phrase “And a great place to work ;)” at the bottom of the entry describing this newspaper chain. Yes, fairly childish. No, I didn’t write it.

The Tampa Tribune doesn’t show up as an IP, but its parent company, Media General, does, with more than 1,000 Wiki-edits performed. Most are minor changes to update on-air personalities or editors at its various media companies, but one trivial change seems particularly funny: In a paragraph comparing the newspaper to the cross-Bay rival St. Petersburg Times, somebody at Media General felt compelled to add the phrase “,published in Tampa, Florida,” after the “The Tampa Tribune.”

Finally, for all you aspiring investigative journalists, two more local governments are devoting your tax dollars to Wiki-editing: the Hillsborough County School Board shows more than 5,000 edits, while USF shows 1,534. They are accuracy-obsessed teachers, after all.

• How exactly did the TV crew become part of the story, as the headline asserts? Other than emotionally?
• $250 million for Pinellas County turkeys/worthwhile local projects, your choice of terminology.
• $70 million for Palm Beach County turkeys/worthwhile local projects, your choice of terminology.
• $8 million for Hillsborough … you know the rest.
• $3.2 million in cuts to nonprofits in Tampa.
• “The newspapers are gone forever.”
  
• World Bank meets on Wolfie Tuesday.
• Does Mitt Romney believe in evolution? Maybe, sort of.
• Oh, and by the way, we’re winning the war in Iraq.
• State of the Democracy: More watched O’Reilly than GOP debate.
• Bob Ross is back; just not at the Tribune.
• The city of Tampa needs to straighten out the West Tampa overlay committee.